Summary

Executive-assistant WhatsApp turns can complete child subagent work successfully, then fail to send any parent reply. The parent session emits NO_REPLY, the gateway logs No reply from agent., and the user receives nothing even though all required child results are present in the session transcript.

Impact

• User-facing WhatsApp thread appears stuck
• Work is completed but silently dropped
• Session history is preserved, but the turn never finalizes into an outbound reply
• This breaks ad hoc standups and any parent turn that relies on sessions_spawn completion events

Repro / Evidence

Environment:

• OpenClaw 2026.3.8
• Gateway running via LaunchAgent on macOS
• Executive Assistant on openai-codex/gpt-5.4

Observed live session:

• Session key: agent:executive-assistant:whatsapp:direct:[REDACTED]
• Session file: agents/executive-assistant/sessions/[REDACTED_SESSION_ID].jsonl

Ad hoc standup flow:

1. Parent agent starts an ad hoc standup turn.
2. Parent spawns two children via sessions_spawn:
   • engineer
   • reviewerops
3. Both child runs complete successfully.
4. Completion events are injected back into the parent session.
5. Parent emits NO_REPLY instead of a user-facing summary.
6. Gateway logs No reply from agent. and WhatsApp gets nothing.

Relevant transcript evidence from the parent session:

• Parent spawned children and received accepted sessions_spawn results.
• Parent then emitted NO_REPLY.
• Later both child completion events arrived in the parent session.
• After each completion event, the parent still emitted NO_REPLY instead of a final response.

Relevant gateway log evidence:

• 2026-03-12T08:24:09.411+08:00 [ws] ⇄ res ✓ agent.wait ...
• 2026-03-12T08:24:19.410+08:00 No reply from agent.
• 2026-03-12T08:24:19.359+08:00 [diagnostic] lane wait exceeded: lane=session:agent:executive-assistant:whatsapp:direct:[REDACTED] waitedMs=9712 queueAhead=0

Expected

When all spawned child tasks complete successfully, the parent turn should reconcile their results and emit a normal assistant reply to the transport.

Actual

The parent suppresses output with NO_REPLY and the transport sends nothing.

Why this looks like an OpenClaw bug

This is not a transport, Node, or provider-fallback issue:

• both children completed successfully
• results were delivered back into the parent session
• the parent/session orchestration failed to convert those results into a final reply

The bug appears to be in parent/subagent completion handling, likely around:

• expected child completion tracking
• NO_REPLY suppression logic
• parent run finalization after child completion events

Suspected fix area

Please inspect the runtime path for:

• sessions_spawn run mode with push-based completion
• parent turns that are instructed to wait for child completions
• any logic that emits NO_REPLY before all expected completions are reconciled
• any logic that treats later child completion events as non-user-facing and never reopens/finalizes the parent turn

Suggested behavior

• Parent should not emit NO_REPLY while it still has pending expected child completions.
• Once all expected child completions arrive, parent should finalize normally into a transport reply.
• If suppression occurs incorrectly, it should become an explicit error state rather than silently dropping the message.